A bit about the development of communication in the network

    Participating in the organization of the Chaos Constructions festival, I also restored my old BBS from the archive.
    And in the process of setting it up and demonstrating it to the festival visitors, I increasingly felt the illogicality of where the development of network communications led us.

    After reading the Story of one point and comments, I see that some do not understand the differences between the Fido and the forums, and argue that having forums is enough. I do not agree with this.


    First, we turn to the history of communication.
    Communication between people on the network is quite simply divided into interactive: chats / pagers, and non-interactive: personal (mail) and group (forums).

    In this article, I will consider only non-interactive, so this is not worth discussing the capabilities of IM and others.

    Let's look at the development of group communication over the past 30 years:

    The first era - modems / BBS.



    The very first example of group communication was the so-called “electronic message board” or BBS .
    What it is? In the early 80s, when the first personal computers and the first modems available to ordinary people began to appear, things like BBS appeared.
    What did it look like? You took your computer, installed a special communication program on it. Now someone else could call you, and by connecting to your program and doing some fairly simple things - write or read a message, download or upload a file, etc. (It is worth noting that since there were no multitasking operating systems for personal computers in those years, during the work of BBS you could not do something else on your computer. Therefore, most often BBS started up or on home machines at night, or on machines at work).
    This was the only way of electronic communication, and he enjoyed quite a lot of popularity. Hundreds of people called BBS to read what other people wrote and chat. Needless to say, the first to get through to such a BBS was often a great difficulty, although with the development of technology, round-the-clock stations and BBSs with several telephone lines began to appear.
    Gradually, such BBS styles were put not only by enthusiasts, but also by large manufacturers of software and hardware, where they laid out firmware and drivers for their products and also carried out technical support.

    So, by the beginning of the 90s, we got dozens / hundreds of BBS enthusiasts in large cities, each of them has a bulletin board, often divided into many subsections on various topics.
    You are forced to dial each separately, register on each, read topics of interest, and repeat the dialer in a day or two to check if someone wrote you an answer.

    Total: full decentralization, often duplicate forums on different BBS.
    The prestige of individual forums was entirely tied to the prestige and literacy of the settings as well as the operating time of a particular BBS. Forum management is exclusively the responsibility of the BBS system operator.

    The second era - modems / FIDO.


    The appearance of the Fido network has significantly expanded the boundaries of then-familiar communication. Special nodes of node communication were created, hubs (usually based on existing BBS) that exchanged messages with each other at regular intervals, from several days to several hours / minutes, and thanks to this, at any connection point, you could see and read the entire message chain . Fido conferences could be read both through special software, having received a network address, and as before - in terminal mode with BBS.

    Total: a developed hierarchical system of forums, from global global to local for a particular site.
    Good centralization within the network, a lot of thematic forums, the relative ease of creating the necessary forums.
    The prestige of a particular conference was provided, firstly, by regular subscribers, and secondly, by a competent moderation policy.
    Management is carried out by one / several people of the "creators" of the conference (moderators), regardless of the transport level.

    The Third Age - Internet / Usenet.



    The Internet developed almost parallel to our history, starting in the 70s, but until a certain point, connecting to it was practically impossible and often meaningless for a simple user. However, in the early 80s, the concept of Usenet , a global thematic forum , was developed . By the beginning of the 90s, it was perfected to perfection, incorporating the best ideas from Fido. Usenet (news / nntp) is actually a more global and significantly accelerated fido. Hierarchical conferences, widespread, fast communication between nodes.

    Created many convenient clients for connecting to the network, for almost any platform. Convenient display of dialogs by "threads (threads)" made it possible to quickly view large discussions, as well as quickly "chop off" uninteresting branches, and not to monitor communication in them.
    Despite the fact that at the moment a small number of people use usenet, I consider this technology one of the most thoughtful at the moment.

    Total: More global.
    All the best that was in Fido, plus great speed and ease of use.

    Age Four - Internet / Forums.


    Starting around the beginning of this century, we have seen a large increase in independent sites with personal forums.
    Gradually, the most frequent way to communicate is the web forum, and not something else, although it is the web that has the most inconvenient communication format. Within the framework of the web, the presentation from the thread is often made flat, and if it is built hierarchically, it is still difficult to conduct large, hundreds of posts, discussions in it.

    I would compare this situation with the time of BBS - in the same way it is necessary to register on each individual forum. In the same way, it is necessary to visit each separate forum with some frequency to check if there is anything new. Moreover, notification of news about mail is an eerie crutch of this technology, there is no other convenient way to notify about read / unread conversations, forums are forced to jump to another protocol (mail) to generate a lot of unnecessary traffic.

    It comes to the ridiculous, on a pair of sites familiar to me there are common thematic branches. Most of the subscribers are present both there and there, therefore, often discussion of something is conducted on two fronts, and it happens that the answer is not always written in the same place where the question was asked.

    Total: full decentralization, many duplicate forums.
    The prestige of individual forums was entirely tied to the prestige of a particular site.
    Forum management is solely the responsibility of the site operator.

    In the last paragraph, you can add various social networks and blog services such as LiveJournal, Dyri, etc. since there is not much difference between them.

    The introduction of RSS makes the picture a little easier, but still does not reach a complete solution and adequate usability.

    Summary


    What are the causes of degradation?
    First of all, it seems to me in a large number of new users who have connected to the network since the beginning of the century.
    Firstly, those who developed forum software did not know and did not know how to work with other communication systems, so they built everything from scratch. Secondly, the ease of installation of the finished forum, as well as the relative ease of use seduced those who again did not see other systems.

    What solution options do I see?


    At the moment, unfortunately, I believe that tearing people away from web forums is almost impossible.

    However, what can you try to do? You can build a more centralized system for the same forum posts. So that everyone could instead of say phpbb or invision put themselves say the next version of phpbb_nextgen, which would be a module of global conferences. And all site administrators could link the conferences of their sites into a single network so that they could see all messages on any of them, wherever they were written.

    In principle, you can probably even use the existing server software from Usenet as a transport by writing only the necessary bindings for conversion / integration with forums. I looked at some ready-made web ntp readers, unfortunately they have very low convenience for the end user.

    Of course, for such a "new" system, some of the new issues (for web forums) need to be resolved:
    * decoupling from the transport level - site administrators should not have more rights than global conference administrators
    * Moreover, conference administrators should have ways to block / punish users who violate the rules , regardless of which site it comes from.
    * A certain kind of global structure, leading a list of “official” conferences, so as not to create duplicate, in general, an analogue of the fidosque echo, is needed.

    Well, gradually, of course, I want to create convenient clients that would allow you to read all these conferences without going to the web. Something like News- or the same RSS-reader.

    PS My experience is Fido since '95, on the Internet since '96. Pictures in an article from Google, the first thing that came across.

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